… I mentioned the overwhelmingly thick fog that we had encountered coming out of Seydisfjordur. This morning when we awoke, the situation hadn’t improved and we were swathed in a rather thick blanket of nebulous nonsense.
I heard the alarm go off at 06:00 and then again at 06:07. However I did manage to beat the 06:20 alarm, although there wasn’t all that much in it.
The weather wasn’t all that good for photography but I took a couple just to be on the safe side, and then went in to breakfast;
After breakfast we put on our winter clothing and headed out to the zodiacs. The sea was calm but visibility was pretty poor and it was trying to rain. We made it ashore at the small town of Djupivogur without any major mishap, but we aren’t staying here. There are a couple of buses waiting for us to take us onward. One of them was an elderly MAN-engined Bova Futura, tri-axle and 15 metres long. Quite naturally I leapt aboard.
After about an hour’s drive we stopped at the Foss Hotel for a toilet break as we were not so equipped on our bus. It gave me an opportunity to have a little wander around and take a couple of photos of the Icelandic scenery. Here on the east coast, the coastal alluvial plain is very good farming country, although it’s compressed up against the mountains in the same way that the land is on the western coast of Newfoundland.
Back on our bus we headed off to the glacial lagoon. Here at the foot of the VatnaJokull ice field, a glacier discharges its icebergs into a lagoon and we had come here to witness it. After all, ice fields, glaciers and icebergs won’t be around for much longer at the current rate of global warming.
We were really lucky too. A huge part of the glacier had calved off a few days ago and the lagoon was littered with icebergs waiting to melt down so that they would be small enough to drift out to see on the meltwater current. There’s a submerged terminal moraine that stops them floating straight out.
First item on the agenda was a good walk down to the lagoon and around its edges looking at the ice. It really was so spectacular down there; A little further around I found a ruined, collapsed bridge. It would be nice to think that it had been brought down by an iceberg or an ice field, but that is extremely unlikely.
Lunch was arranged for us too, and they did me proud with a vegan carrot soup followed by ratatouille. No complaints at all there, except that a second helping would have been delicious.
Once lunch was over we donned more wet-weather gear and headed off to one of their zodiacs. A young Czech student took us out for a ride around the lagoon to see the icebergs, the ice face and to tell us all about the place and the history. And it started to rain while we were out there.
Our zodiac was almost the last back so our bus was last to leave. And on the way back we were waylaid for 15 minutes by a pack of harbour seals on a gravel bank just offshore. One of them was having a whale of a time floundering and flouncing about in the water, giving all of us quite a performance.
With a pit stop too back at the Foss Hotel, we were definitely the last back at the quayside and the zodiac crews had gone to sleep. There wasn’t time to put on our wet-weather gear because we needed to leave our anchorage pretty smartly, so we all ended up rather damp, as by now it was raining quite heavily.
Back on board, I headed for a shower. Not because I needed one but because it’s the quickest way of warming me up. And I washed my clothes too. They were quite wet anyway with the rain so they would benefit.
After tea I lounged around for a while but there’s a late breakfast on offer tomorrow so now is the time for an early night, I reckon and I can catch up on my beauty sleep.
If only …
